Famous Journal Keepers on Keeping a Journal
Keeping a journal allows writers to examine the present and create a narrative for their future selves to gain insight from. Many use their diaries and journals not only to explore their anxieties but also work out ideas and characters. Here is a glimpse of how some famous writers view the practice of journaling.
Anaïs Nin: journaling as a vice
“This diary is my kief, hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice. Instead of writing a novel, I lie back with this book and a pen, and dream, and indulge in refractions and defractions … I must relive my life in the dream. The dream is my only life.” — Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 1
Susan Sontag: escaping into her diary
“The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.” — Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
Sylvia Plath: coping mechanism for mental illness
“Just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less! – – – and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow.” — Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Virginia Woolf: good writing practice
“I believe that during the past year I can trace some increase of ease in my professional writing which I attribute to my casual half hours after tea. Moreover, there looms ahead of me the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to. I might in the course of time learn what it is that one can make of this loose, drifting material of life; finding another use for it than the use I put it to, so much more consciously and scrupulously, in fiction.” — Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary
Franz Kafka: reminder of personal strength
“In the diary you find proof that in situations which today would seem unbearable, you lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand moved then as it does today, when we may be wiser because we are able to look back upon our former condition, and for that very reason have got to admit the courage of our earlier striving in which we persisted even in sheer ignorance.” — Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923
John Steinbeck: tool for self-discipline
“In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently, there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established. There is no possibility, in me at least, of saying, ‘I’ll do it if I feel like it.’ One never feels like awaking day after day. In fact, given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all. The rest is nonsense. Perhaps there are people who can work that way, but I cannot. I must get my words down every day whether they are any good or not.” — John Steinbeck, Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath